Where to put captions on Reels and Shorts
By AutoCap · 31 October 2026
Reels and Shorts draw buttons and text over the bottom and right of your video. Where that interface sits, and how to keep captions clear of it.
The part of the screen you don't get
A vertical video on Instagram Reels or YouTube Shorts is never shown on its own. The app lays its own interface over it: the account name and the post's text along the bottom, a column of buttons down the right-hand side, and a header across the top. None of that is visible while you edit, and all of it appears the moment the video is posted.
Captions suffer most, because the bottom of the frame is where most of us put them out of habit. Subtitles on television and in cinemas sit low on the screen. Copy that position onto a phone and the caption lands underneath the username and the first lines of the description, exactly where a viewer's eyes go to read it.
What sits where
The two apps arrange their controls similarly enough to plan for both at once. Neither publishes exact measurements, and both rearrange things between releases, so treat any figure as an estimate rather than a specification.
- Bottom: the account name, the post text and, on many posts, an audio label or a button. This is the deepest band, and the one captions collide with most often.
- Right edge: the rail of like, comment, share and audio buttons. It covers the end of any caption line that runs the full width of the frame.
- Top: the phone's status bar and the app's own header controls.
- Left edge: nothing is drawn there, but text that runs up to the edge of a phone screen looks cramped, and curved displays can cut it off.
The margins AutoCap marks out
AutoCap's safe-area guide, the dotted-square button beside the aspect choices above the preview, shades the edges of a vertical frame: 20% of its height at the bottom and 12% at the top, 14% of its width on the right and 5% on the left. Those figures are the overlap of what Reels, Shorts and TikTok were seen to draw over a video, widened on purpose: a caption inside that box stays clear on each of them, rather than fitting one app's layout perfectly and another's badly.
The guide only shows you the boundary. It is drawn in the preview and never in the export, and it doesn't move a caption that crosses it; a template's starting position can sit inside the shaded band, so switch the guide on after choosing a design and drag the caption up if it needs to go.
They are percentages rather than pixels for a practical reason. The same project is previewed at whatever size your screen allows and exported at whichever resolution you pick, and a fraction of the frame is the only measurement that means the same thing at both sizes.
Other shapes need less room. For square videos the guide shades 14% at the bottom, 8% at the top and 8% on the right. Landscape video gets the traditional title-safe area, 5% on every side, which also keeps text away from the controls and timestamp a video player shows along its bottom edge.
Placing captions in practice
Think of those margins as a boundary, not a target. Inside them, a few habits decide whether a caption is comfortable to read once the video is live:
- Keep captions centred and in the lower middle of the frame, just above the bottom band rather than inside it.
- Keep lines short. A caption that needs the whole width will reach under the button rail; two short lines hold up where one long line does not. The guide to caption length goes into this in detail.
- Check where faces are before settling on a position. A caption across a speaker's mouth is harder to read and hides the expression that carries the sentence.
- Leave room for a long description. More lines of post text push the app's bottom band further up the video.
- When the background is busy, choose a style with an outline or a box behind the text; the caption styles page shows how each one looks.
Where the margins can be wrong
The margins are an estimate, and they age. The apps change their layouts, some posts add extra lines for a location, a collaborator or a product tag, and phones with different screen shapes frame the video differently. A caption inside the box was clear on the layouts the figures came from; that says nothing certain about the next update.
The margins also know nothing about your video. If the most important thing on screen sits where the caption would go, moving the caption is the right decision even when the margins would allow the lower position. Before an important post, play the exported file in the app's own preview on a phone and watch the first few seconds with the interface drawn over it.
Questions
Should captions sit at the bottom, like subtitles on TV?
Not on vertical short videos. The bottom band is where Reels and Shorts show the account name and post text, so captions placed there get covered. Put them just above that band, in the lower middle of the frame.
Why is the right margin wider than the left?
Because the like, comment and share buttons run down the right edge on both apps. The left edge only needs enough space that text doesn't touch the side of the screen.
Do landscape YouTube videos need the same space?
No. A 5% margin on every side is enough for landscape video. It keeps captions inside the traditional title-safe area and clear of the player's controls.